Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have made incredibly fast progress in past years, pushing the efficiency approaching 26%, which is comparable to the best silicon solar cells. One of the features...

MXenes, a newly intriguing family of 2D materials, have recently attracted considerable attention owing to their excellent properties such as high electrical conductivity and mobility, tunable structure, and termination groups. Here, the Ti3C2Tx MXene is incorporated into the perovskite absorber layer for the first time, which aims for efficiency enhancement. Results show that the termination groups of Ti3C2Tx can retard the crystallization rate, thereby increasing the crystal size of CH3NH3PbI3. It is found that the high electrical conductivity and mobility of MXene can accelerate the charge transfer. After optimizing the key parameters, 12% enhancement in device performance is achieved by 0.03 wt% amount of MXene additive. This work unlocks opportunities for the use of MXene as potential materials in perovskite solar cell applications.

Two parallel thinning algorithms are presented and evaluated in this article. The two algorithms use two-subiteration approaches: (1) alternatively deleting north and east and then south and west boundary pixels and (2) alternately applying a thinning operator to one of two subfields. Image connectivities are proven to be preserved and the algorithms' speed and medial curve thinness are compared to other two-subiteration approaches and a fully parallel approach. Both approaches produce very thin medial curves and the second achieves the fastest overall parallel thinning.

For the first time, a new lead-free double perovskite Cs2NaBiI6 material was synthesized and applied to the perovskite solar cells.

CsPbI2Br perovskite solar cells have attracted much attention because of the rapid development in their efficiency and their great potential as a top cell of tandem solar cells. However, the V OC outputs observed so far in most cases are far from that desired for a top cell. Up to now, with various kinds of treatments, the reported champion V OC is only 1.32 V, with a V OC deficit of 0.60 V. In this work, we found that aging of the SnCl2 precursor solution for the electron-transporting layer can promote the V OC of CsPbI2Br solar cells by employing a dopant-free-polymer hole transport material (HTM) over 1.40 V and efficiency over 15.5% with high reproducibility. With the champion V OC of 1.43 V, the V OC deficit was reduced to <0.50 V, which is achieved for the first time. This simple technique of SnCl2 solution aging forms a uniform and smooth amorphous SnO x film with pure Sn4+, elevates the conduction band of SnO x , and reduces the interfacial gaps and the trap state density of the device, resulting in enhancement in average V OC from ∼1.2 V in the nonaged case to ∼1.4 V in the aged case. Furthermore, the device using an aged SnCl2 solution also exhibits a much better long-term stability than that made of the fresh solution. These achievements in dopant/additive-free CsPbI2Br solar cells can be useful for future research on CsPbI2Br and tandem solar cells.